if the mob is going to die in less than 6 seconds, why would you want dot it with in the first place knowing that the spell will not run its course.

Who's to say you knew? The Elegon P1 adds for example would take us anywhere from 20s to half a second to drop half of his HP.

Originally Posted by elpadrino293

the damage over time is not that significant of a difference between the two spells, honestly look at the tables on the first page, especially at lower haste levels (12.6% plateau). and as far the actual ticks themselves are concerned, LB ticks for more. it gets 26% spell power, compared to NT's 17.4%. it really is only after 6414 haste that you will start to benefit from NT's superior scaling in terms of haste. and even then, it is completely is inferior to living bomb with 3 targets within 10 yards of each other. and if living bomb can't cleave, nether tempest cannot either, and we are discussing single target damage again.

(Particularily referring to the bolded part) LB ticks for more because it only ticks a third as often. Also, isn't the ST damage on NT higher anyways?

Originally Posted by elpadrino293

you could make the argument that NT's secondary target has to be in range for just a moment to get a fraction of the cleave, but i would argue the same for living bomb except it would get 100% of the cleave.

but the bottom line is that, you simply get far more time to cast fireballs/pyroblasts when using LB at lower haste levels, it is very clear to see in the math, for a rather small trade off in mage bomb damage.

-------it really is only after 6414 haste that you will start to benefit from NT's superior scaling in terms of haste.------

to be honest, i'm not too sure what the ST is referring to.
6116 haste is a fairly large amount, yet still not the next break point, and your mastery is so low. but it seems to be working okay for your ignites/combustions after looking at your logs.

doesnt the fact that NT ticks more often than LB over its duration, mean that its less likely to lose a big portion of its damage if it ends early. In my raid at least its very hard to predict if the target will live for the whole duration unless its actually on the boss (25 man)

A consideration that has not been mentioned is that while you -can- refresh LB in a larger window than NT to get full damage out of it, doing so costs you DPS in losing ignite damage. Refreshing LB early will give you full damage from it, but will be one second less spent casting fireball or scorch, so you are losing damage in that regard. What you gain is a more forgiving bomb for erroneous play in refreshing early, but a damage loss in doing so which is not being considered.

There are also moments in which you will not want to refresh a bomb, for instance if you receive hot streak with 0.5s on LB, or have a high ignite + unimpacted pyroblast on the target, or a good ignite and combustion available, your next global should be pyroblast or IB, not LB, since having LB on the target isn't giving you anything when you impact a strong ignite / pyroblast dot / combustion onto adjacent targets.

Fire places less emphasis on bomb damage now than the other specs do. Bomb is high DPET, but fire gains no procs out of it the way frost does, and bomb application does not proc something like it can proc arcane missiles for arcane, nor does it benefit from mastery like bomb does for arcane. Thus, 100% uptime on bomb as fire is not as requisite as it is for the other specs.

Another consideration is that in the case of the strongest trinkets (Light of the Cosmos / Breath of the Hydra etc) which proc from periodic damage, LB's lower tick frequency means these trinkets will have lower uptimes and be less dependable. When playing with LB as arcane on heroic Empress back last tier, I found that LotC was very unreliable proccing on the pull in order to have its proc for alter time. NT has a much more frequent tick rate, ensuring higher uptime on these particular trinkets.

My mage is Kefka on Draenor EU, just for clarification. And yes, me and our Warlock usually go down to the second nest which spawns somewhere around the end of bloodlust. We have our 2 Hunters doing all the other nests.

But yeah, Living Bomb wouldn't have made much of a difference either way. Perhaps I'd have done a couple hundred more DPS... maybe.